Not only do searches get drowned in spam they also get drowned in "the narrative". Searches for controversial topics, unless specifically searching for the names of sites which oppose (not all of them necessarily being truthful in their opposition) "the narrative", pretty much only return the sorts of results which support "the narrative" of present day politics/culture as presented by pro-big-government types. Unless you already know what it is called and where to look, search engines will no longer show you anything outside what their middle-managerial functionaries deem to be "acceptable opinions", you won't get served results from The Brownstone Institute, the AIER, the Daily Sceptic or Unherd (those 4 being the most immediately coming-to-mind of truthful anti-narrative sources) unless you search for them by name...
Then technical searches get drowned in lists of sites which contain your technical terms of interest as part of a wall of text fileld with nothing but other random technical words, sites set up to draw traffic to serve ads to I guess, because clearly nobody can read them. And/or lists of sites which might be AI generated, or might be created by poorly paid writers hired to simply fill pages with things which sound much like what is written elsewhere about a topic, and tell you exactly the same vague over-view of the thing you're looking for, with none of the details you were actually searching for. Sites of this kind all look to be copies of each other worded with just enough difference not to be spotted as such by search engines, again the business model looks to be luring in viewers who'll quickly recognise the page as worthless junk, but serving them ads first. How glad I am to have an ad blocker.